Re: How to Turn Off Autodiscovered Printers in Firefox?
On 2017-09-26, Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> wrote:
> On Tue 26 Sep 2017 at 00:15:31 -0500, Kent West wrote:
>
>> So when I go to select a printer in Firefox, there are many autodiscovered
>> printers to choose from. I don't want any of them in my list. How do I turn
>> this off?
>
> See later. But first stop or purge cups-browsed.
>
>> I found the two "browse" options in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, but they make no
>> difference. I found /etc/cups/cups-browsed, but killing that daemon makes
>> no difference. In fact, killing CUPS altogether makes no difference (except
>> my desired printer then goes away), so obviously this isn't a CUPS thing.
>
> Correct.
>
>> Then I discovered Avahi (and had to go into learning mode - apparently this
>> is also known as "Bonjour" and "Rendevous" and "ZeroConf", depending on OS
>> and version and situation). The most obvious tweaks in
>> /"etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf", the two "disable-publishing..." options,
>> don't do anything.
>
> Indeed not. They affect publishing, not discovery.
>
>> But I can "systemctl disable avahi-daemon" altogether to get rid of the
>> unwanted printers. But that seems like overkill, and disables all of
>> Avahi's function (I was pleased to learn I can find non-Windows clients on
>> our mostly-Windows-oriented network using Avahi, just by adding ".local" to
>> the hostname - ex. "ping bigserver" fails, but "ping bigserver.local" gets
>> replies - sweet!).
>
> Without avahi-daemon running Firefox cannot discover printers or print
> servers on the network from their DNS-SD broadcasts.
>
>> So, any one know how to tell Avahi to not publish found printers to
>> Firefox's print dialog?
>
> All GTK applications can use avahi-daemon for printer discovery. It is
> GTK you want to control, not avahi-daemon. gtk-print-backends is the
> relevant property to use. Its default value is "file,cups".
>
> I think Firefox uses GTK3. In /etc/gtk-3.0 or ~/.gtk-3.0 you want to
> create the file settings.ini and see what the contents
>
> [Settings]
> gtk-print-backends=file
>
> do for you. (The file name and format is different for GTK2).
>
Some anonymous joe on the internet said you can edit the [server]
section of the /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf file and uncomment the
'enable-dbus=yes' line, changing that line to 'enable-dbus=no' and this
will disable printer discovery (while retaining dns functionality).
Whether this works or not, or how perilously or ridiculously close this
edit is to just turning the damned avahi thing off altogether, I do not
know.
--
"A simpering Bambi narcissist and a thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf."
Christopher Hitchens, commenting shortly after the nearly concurrent deaths
of Lady Diana and Mother Theresa.
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